The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
TRANSPORTATION KEY TO REGION’S PAST AND FUTURE
Roads, rails, air all need upgrades
NEW HAVEN — The city has two interstate highways and a parkway, trains that travel to New York, Hartford and to the eastern shoreline and a regional airport minutes from downtown.
But despite millions of state and federal dollars spent on improvements, including new train cars, a new rail line to Springfield, Mass., and a completely redesigned highway interchange, the area’s transportation infrastructure fails to adequately meet the needs of a city that is home to a major university and hospital and businesses seeking to grow or move into the region, say those who want to see Greater New Haven continue as a vibrant metropolis.
Since the automobile first became popular and affordable almost 100 years ago, it has always been so.
Congestion is not new
In 1937, Mayor John W. Murphy was so concerned about the number of cars downtown that his annual message addressed the issue as:
“Like many other cities, New Haven has much traffic congestion caused by needless and excessive parking in and near the center of the city. Many persons residing
near their place of employment or business in the center of the city, drive cars to the center and park them on the street or elsewhere. They could benefit their health by walking to and from business and relieve parking conditions by leaving their cars at home.”
Douglas Rae, a onetime chief administrative officer for the city who is a professor of management and political science at Yale University, quotes Murphy in his 2003 book, “City: Urbanism and Its End,” showing that New Haven was clogged with traffic even in the depths of the Depression.
In addition to the local drivers, before Jan. 2, 1958 — when Interstate 95 brought President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System to Connecticut — New Haven had to contend with thousands of drivers traveling between New York and Boston on Route 1, what we know as Columbus and Forbes avenues, including the Tomlinson Bridge.
A 1937 map by Richard Guyot Dana printed in “City” shows an 18,000-car “peak load” on the streets west of downtown.
“The main road from New York to Boston came right through downtown New Haven,” Rae said. “It was Congress Avenue and the main road to Hartford, which they called College Highway, was Whitney Avenue. It was like 12,000 cars on ordinary streets.”
In fact, “City” records that, years earlier, Mayor David Fitzgerald had written, “Those who, in the distant past, had charge of laying out our roadways … had not the faintest notion that in the streets of New Haven, in 1923, thousands of automobiles would be in operation,” parked along the narrow streets and threatening the ability of fire engines to squeeze through.
And this was at a time when a network of trolleys ran throughout the city and across the state. New Haven, the last city to feature the streetcars, saw its last trolley run on Sept. 25, 1948.
“It was really hard to get through the city” in the first half of the 20th century, Rae said. “The highway story begins with that. Any American city of any consequence became a clot of immobile traffic” between 1920 and 1940. “In those 20 years the automobile destroyed the fabric of most cities and they’ve spent the last 50 years building highways and other alternatives, often not very intelligently and often with ulterior purposes in mind.”
Moving people
Those motives often included tearing down tenements, the most well known being Oak Street, which was razed for a highway that was meant to connect New Haven with the lower Naugatuck Valley but never got there. It was part of Mayor Richard C. Lee’s urban renewal program.
“They used highway construction as a financing and political mechanism to tear all that housing out,” Rae said. Route 34 — the Oak Street Connector, later renamed the Richard C. Lee Highway — never got much farther than downtown, although space was cleared 650 feet wide, Rae said, much more than needed for a highway, all the way to what is now Ella T. Grasso Boulevard.
Now, the Route 34 expressway, as well as the land beyond, is being re-created to blend it into a cityscape and remove the divide between downtown and the Hill neighborhood.
While both I-95 and Interstate 91, which opened Jan. 6, 1966, made it easier to travel long distances, they, too, ravaged neighborhoods, especially the Wooster Square section.
“I was born on 25 Chestnut St., which no longer exists,” said Frank Gargano, 68, an independent embalmer. It was across from the former C. Cowles & Co. “Chestnut Street went all the way down to Water Street and there were tenement houses there and they were all wiped out,” he said. “Wooster Street used to go to East Street, straight through Connecticut Co. Car 775 on Chapel Street near Temple Street, May 9, 1936. The last trolley ran in New Haven on Sept. 25, 1948.
from Franklin to East.”
Many residents moved to the 72 apartments known as the Columbus Mall that was built on Wooster Street in the early 1960s, Gargano said. Displaced residents were given first choice and Gargano’s parents “did take advantage of that because they never drove,” he said.
Gargano, who has been president of the St. Andrew Society for 21 years, said the change in the neighborhood, caused by the razing of homes as well as the move to the suburbs brought on by the automobile, can be seen in the numbers who attend St. Michael Roman Catholic Church on Wooster Place, the east side of the square. In the early 1900s, there were 10,000 families who attended. “Now we’re lucky if we have 300,” he said.
I-95 cut Wooster Square off from New Haven Harbor and the former Seaside Park, a popular summer spot that no longer exists. Then I-91 sliced through Wooster, Chapel and streets north, turning to the northeast when it approached the East Rock area, paralleling State Street rather than running between Orange Street and Whitney Avenue.
“(I-91) was originally planned to go right through the fanciest part of East Rock, and the high bourgeois, the upper-income residents, rose up and stopped it, made it go closer to a workingclass neighborhood, as it does now,” Rae said.
Other decisions that look poor in hindsight appeared to make sense at the time, he said. “We all look at I-95, the way it … separates the urban fabric from Long Island Sound. We all wish they had found a way to run it inland.”
In the 1950s, however, “the New Haven Harbor part of the Sound bore a close resemblance to a sewer,” Rae said. “It was a stinking mess.”
Despite the interstates, numerous downtown parking garages and lots, people still complain about parking downtown. But the most clogged roads are no longer Congress or Forbes avenues, but instead are the interstates that took on the load of through traffic.
State seeks ‘best-in-class’ system
There’s no doubt in state Transportation Commissioner James Redeker’s mind that transportation “ranks No. 1” among challenges for the state, “everywhere you look, when you talk about Connecticut’s economy and what matters to people. There hasn’t been a business survey that doesn’t make it a top priority, not as a good thing but as an impediment.”
In 2015, Redeker was charged with implementing Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s 30-year $100.3 billion “Let’s Go CT!” program to create “a best-in-class transportation system for the longterm,” as his proposal described it.
“The governor called me in the day after he was re-elected and said, ‘Are you ready?’ ” Redeker said. It began with a “$28 billion additional funding decision by the governor and legislature on top of what was a 65 percent increase in capital funding in 2015,” he said.
The five-year ramp-up to the “Let’s Go CT!” plan doubled spending, which “allowed us to
catch up on investing” in all modes of transportation, including replacing the Pearl Harbor Memorial Bridge and the highway interchange in New Haven and the Moses Wheeler Bridge between Milford and Stratford. The projects were built despite a decrease in DOT employees from 5,000 to 3,000.
“We’ve been able to do a heck of a lot more with fewer people,” Redeker said.
The DOT also was allowed to do “design-build” projects, in which the department oversaw both the design and construction of projects, although much of the construction work has been bid out to private contractors.
In 1984, all of Interstate 84 in Southington was replaced in one weekend, Redeker said, and “since then we’ve done about 20 accelerated bridge projects. The fact is we’re doing projects with virtually no impact in terms of taking roads out of service.”
Redeker calls New Haven “the epicenter of the transportation system. You’ve got a city that has focused on and we have focused with them on effective use of infrastructure,” including bicycle lanes and walking trails.
“There’s been investment; there’s been a lot of help from Yale … but it is a place that is a quality, walkable city. … You don’t have to own a car there. … You can walk safely and bike safely.”
Anthony Rescigno, who was president of the Greater New Haven Chamber of Commerce from 2000 until Garrett Sheehan took over in March, said highway congestion has improved since the New Haven Harbor interchange project was completed.
“I’m sure there was a lot of frustration with all the construction,” he said. “The construction took so long. While that was happening there’s a lot of inconvenience for people. People couldn’t get in so they just kept going. I think things will settle down now. It’s an improvement now that it’s complete.”
Trains: A critical lifeline
Malloy’s 30-year plan called for “a significant investment in the rail system in the upfront years … a reflection of what I think is one of the gems and critical lifelines in Connecticut,” Redeker said. It included a final total of 471 M8 rail cars, which run on Metro-North’s New Haven Line and New Canaan branch. Eventually, new cars will be purchased to serve the Danbury and Waterbury branches, Shore Line East and the newest addition to the rail system, the Hartford Line between New Haven and Springfield, Massachusetts, according to state Department of Transportation spokesman Judd Everhart.
“That purchase, when completed, we’ll have the newest rail fleet in the country,” Redeker said. The new rail cars were necessary, he said, because “we’ve got the busiest rail system in the country.” A state-of-the-art rail maintenance facility has been built in New Haven, as well.
The Hartford line has been a success so far, with 19,767 trips in June, not including the first weekend, when rides were free, and 49,300 riders in July. The July total was double the number who rode the Amtrak train on that line in July 2017, according to the DOT.
For the future, the DOT is looking into some Metro-North trains going to Penn Station rather than Grand Central Terminal. “The ability to get to the west side of Manhattan directly with more trains is a huge possibility,” Redeker said.
While Penn Station is “pure hell; it’s just an awful place,” according to Rae, “Yale has been pushing behind the scenes for some time in this direction,” he said. “It isn’t going to get solved once and for all anytime soon.”
Train service certainly has come a long way since the 1980s and earlier, “the days of bankrupt railroads with the state subsidizing awful service,” Redeker said. “Metro-North and New Jersey Transit were created to take over bankrupt operations (of ) a dilapidated railroad.”
When the M8 cars first rolled down the tracks in 2011, they were replacing cars dating from 1983, “the oldest fleet in the country with horrible performance,” Redeker said.
Part of the creation of the Hartford line involved reinstalling double tracking along part of the north-south corridor. In the 1990s, “Amtrak sold the metal of the second set of tracks because they had no money to operate,” Redeker said.
If it was bad in Connecticut, New Jersey was worse, Redeker said, with buses rusted through and trains operating on time less than half the time. Members of a commuter wives group lied on the tracks in protest, he said.
Metro-North faces an end-ofyear deadline to implement Positive Train Control, a safety feature that would prevent accidents caused by excessive speed or train collisions. Redeker said the system is “99 percent done today” with “maximum authorized speed” features already implemented. “The last feature is the feature that would keep two trains on the same track from hitting each other,” he said.
Jim Cameron, founder of the Commuter Action Group, which advocates for better rail service, said ridership on the Hartford line has “already surpassed what their first-year estimate would be.” On the other hand, “on the New Haven line, we still are looking at the lowest on-time performance in five years. This summer it was down to 85 percent,” he said. And until more M8 rail cars are put into service next year, “in the meantime, we have a lot of standing-room-only,” he said.
According to the state Department of Transportation, MetroNorth’s New Haven line carried 40.2 million passengers in 2017, up from 39 million in 2013 (but slightly down from 2016’s 40.5 million). The other branches’ 2017 totals were New Canaan, 1.5 million; Danbury, 740, 238, and Waterbury, 165,552. The council did not report total ridership for Shore Line East, which recently endured major complaints about its service, carried 786,331 passengers in 2017, down from a high of 934,654 in 2014 and 905,561 in 2013.
Factories to ‘eds and meds’
Rae said “the larger question about New Haven and its future has got to be about trains and planes.” Cars, buses and trolleys were integral to workers getting to major factories of Sargent & Co. and Winchester Repeating Arms, which employed 36,000 workers between them. However, there has been “a huge shift in the demography of the American workers that traces roughly the (last) 50 years,” he said.
Now, New Haven’s economy is based on “eds and meds” — education (Yale and five other universities and colleges) and medicine (Yale New Haven Hospital, the Yale School of Medicine and other medical providers).
While households of the 1950s and ’60s were more likely than now to be one-career families, “now all the alphas are marrying alphas,” Rae said. “It means that virtually everybody … will have a partner who also has a career.”
But in order for both members of a couple, who both may be medical specialists, to get good jobs, one may have to work in New York because New Haven doesn’t have the needed number of jobs, he said.
“There is the threat of decline, the very real prospect of inability to compete for talent in New Haven unless New Haven is a plausible place where one or more of the jobs is in New York City, which makes trains absolutely vital,” Rae said.
“The train service to New York is not terrible, but not really good enough that you would expect somebody to do it on an everyday basis,” he said.
For Rae, “the speed and quality of the commuter rail between here and New York is a pivotal issue for Yale and the hospital and the businesses in New Haven.
In the 1940s, Rae said, the fastest train to New York was the Merchants Limited, which made the run in 1 hour, 23 minutes. “Now, the commonest scheduled time for a train to Grand Central is 2 hours and 4 minutes and the fastest is an hour, 40 minutes,” he said.
“Transportation is a key factor in the future of New Haven,” said Karen Burnaska, coordinator of Transit for Connecticut and onetime member of the state Transportation Strategy Board, which was disbanded in 2011. “To me the key is you have to have a coordinated intermodal system. … When they had these terrible accidents on Metro-North, the highway was clogged.”
Playing catch-up
While Malloy’s 30-year plan totals more than $100 billion, Redeker said, “fully two-thirds of that is about state-of-good-repair for what we have today.”
Donald Shubert, president of the Connecticut Construction Industries Association, said that means the state must spend at least $2 billion a year just to maintain infrastructure it has. But the DOT is only budgeted for $1.5 billion. “We’re not even spending at the pace we need to spend to maintain the current levels of service and systems, let alone improving mobility,” Shubert said.
“We’re in a weird situation. Every time we use money to do mobility enhancements, we’re falling behind in state of good repair,” he said.
A recent report by TRIP, a Washington-based transportation research nonprofit, said that 308 of Connecticut’s 4,254 bridges were structurally deficient and 59 percent of the state’s bridges are more than 50 years old, the fourth highest share in the United States. And a 2017 TRIP report cited a study showing every dollar in deferred maintenance cost $4 to $5 in repairs down the road.
But there isn’t agreement about how to raise the money needed, with revenue from the gasoline tax falling. Shubert believes tolls are inevitable to ease the burden on state residents by charging out-of-state drivers, including trucks traveling through the state.
“The Connecticut taxpayers can either pay 100 percent or they can pay 60 percent, and I don’t know any other taxing plan other than tolls” that raises the required amount of revenue without overburdening taxpayers, Shubert said.
According to a 2017 report by the American Road & Transportation Builders Association, commissioned by the CCIA, if “Let’s Go CT!” is not fully implemented, Connecticut would miss